You can now read and download my master’s thesis with the pretentious-sounding title “Epistemological (Un)certainties: The Literary Journalism of William T. Vollmann and Johny Pitts as a Challenge to Objective Journalism” on NTNU Open by clicking this link, or read the abstract below:

The genre of literary journalism combines literature’s imaginative ways of creating narratives with journalism’s focus on accurately describing reality. This twofold orientation challenges the norms of objective journalism, a genre of writing that has come under increasing critical scrutiny. By analyzing William T. Vollmann’s Riding Toward Everywhere (2008) and Johny Pitts’ Afropean (2019), this thesis explores a selection of the techniques literary journalists employ in practice and how they offer alternative ways of imagining reality. Both authors display an increased self-reflectivity, which allows for a more transparent construction of the world through language. Their overt involvement in the text can be seen on different levels as they use their works for autobiographical self-realization and situate their writing within a wider cultural trajectory. Similarly, both authors reflect on their immersion within the environment and point to the epistemological possibilities and limitations of their writing. Yet despite the commonalities, the two publications have a different focus: while Vollmann’s work is riddled with epistemological doubts that question common-sensical understandings of both literature and journalism, Pitts has a more activist agenda and raises awareness about African European communities.